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I did not grow up in the 1960s, and I can’t claim any special knowledge of the magical and tumultuous period of American culture. However, I did grow up in the 1970s, when there was still just a faint afterglow of that glorious time. I vividly remember that day in 1975 when Saigon fell to…
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The Fixx was one of those cool 1980s bands that seemed to have their finger on the pulse of (then) modern American culture, never mind the fact that they were a bunch of Brits. I saw them one Halloween night at the University of Florida Bandshell, where the student government used to host all kinds…
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I was born in the 1960s, which means I am among the first generation to grow up with color TV. This also means I am also among the first Americans who are able to see their past in color. Or, at least, the urban landscape of our past. Maybe that’s why I love old TV…
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In this episode, Ash and Margaret finish-off Jean Rhys’s classic 1967 novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea.” Also, Margaret explains the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope to Ash, while Ash considers how “Wide Sargasso Sea” might have been improved if the main character had known Kung Fu.
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Back in the 1980s, there was no worse gaffe that a nerdy, trying-to-be-cool high school boy could commit than referring to The Who’s greatest song as “Teenage Wasteland.” (Yeah, I did it.) Never mind the fact that “Teenage Wasteland” is the chorus of the song, and it’s most powerful lyric. That’s not the name of…
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(Actually, it made my freakin year.) https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781639106974
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Most of the art I’ve included in my on-going Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series has been from the 1970s and 1980s. Two golden ages of sci-fi, surely, which, more importantly, marked my golden age of sci-fi—my middle- and high-school years when I devoured all kinds of science fiction novels from the previous decades. And so…
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When The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” hit the airwaves (yes, we still had radio back then) in 1997, it became an instant classic, and no one knew why. A rock song with an orchestra and virtually no electric guitar, it sounded utterly different from anything else in the rock world at that time. In fact,…
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Like a lot of people, my first exposure to Walter Mosely was when I saw the 1995 film adaptation of his novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington. It’s a good movie, with fine performances by Washington and Don Cheadle, but it didn’t inspire me to seek out Mosely’s fiction. As far as…
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Even now, forty-plus years after its inception, the musical genre known as “goth rock” still bewitches me. Great bands like Bauhaus and Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen and Siouxie and the Banshees all seemed to break out when I was in high school. In other words, when I needed them most. I was…
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Ash Clifton, Writer 